


all my scars are open

by jacyevans



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Coda, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Pre-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, The Force, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23389462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacyevans/pseuds/jacyevans
Summary: After the battle on Crait, after closing the door to the Falcon in Ben's face, Rey expects the Force to follow suit; to shut down the bond between them, a door locked forever. Instead, their connection is stronger than ever.“I don’t want this,” she says, rough and raw.Ben leans forward, breath warm against her neck as he whispers, “Liar.”
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 18
Kudos: 65
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems, Reylo Moodboard Inspiration





	all my scars are open

**Author's Note:**

  * For [niennathegrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niennathegrey/gifts).



> This was inspired by the below moodboard by Bea/niennathegrey. For a while now, I've wanted to write something that SOMEHOW connected how Rey and Ben felt about each other at the end of TLJ vs. Ben's attitude and Rey's anger at the beginning of TRoS. Hopefully, I did that justice.
> 
> Thank you to redbelles for the beta. Title from "Impossible" by James Arthur.

  


Rey dreams of Ben Solo from the moment Finn pulls her into the war, images fleeting and shimmering, slipping through her fingers like smoke. A flash of green when she touches Luke’s saber; a smiling child drawing images with his finger in the dust when her fingers touch the control panel on the Falcon for the first time.

When Kylo Ren removes his helmet on the Starkiller base, Rey swallows. His eyes, his hair, the slope of his nose and the angle of his cheekbones -- everything about him is achingly familiar in a way she can't quite place. 

When the two of them fight in that forest on the base, Ben wields the Force like a hammer, Rey tugging back with nothing but blind faith. The tide of the duel spins back and forth, as quickly as they move through the snow. Almost like they know what the other will do before the thought of movement even enters their minds.

In the face of all this, their Force connection is jarring, unwelcome, but not entirely surprising.

After the battle on Crait, after closing the door to the Falcon in his face, Rey expects the Force to follow suit; to shut down the bond between them, a door locked forever.

Instead, their connection is stronger than ever, flashes of Ben’s emotions rolling across the bond in bursts, like lightning and thunder - white-hot anger, boiling her blood, and a deep, aching sadness that grates across her skin, rough as desert sand.

“Did you really expect it to be that easy?” Ben says; images fade in and out of sight, like a broken holo, Ben standing in front of a large window up in space, stars fading into the moss-covered cliff face at the edge of the sea on Ajan Kloss.

She clenches her jaw, hands twisted into fists at her sides.

“Are you going to ignore me now?”

“I don’t want this,” she says, rough and raw. Ben chuckles, the sound raising goosebumps across her skin. No, that was the chill of the sea air. Nothing more.

He raises his head with a half-smile, and she resists the urge to step back as he crosses the distance between them, raising a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear.

He leans forward, breath warm against her neck as he whispers, _“Liar.”_

Her skin burns where he touches; the feeling lasts long after their connection breaks.

\--

She sees Ben again on the Falcon while she’s poring over one of the Jedi tomes she stole from Luke, searching for a way to fix his broken saber. She turns Han’s dice over and over in her palm, for want of something to do with her hands.

Her mind tingles with that too-familiar hum, and she sighs, wanting nothing more than a quiet morning alone with her thoughts. Her tongue gets caught in her throat as she lifts her head.

Ben is standing so close, she can feel his body heat, warming her through and stirring her blood in ways she doesn’t have a name for.

Rey presses her hand to the control panel and stills. For a fleeting moment, an image appears behind her eyes, Ben's eyes, barely more than sounds and colors: a child running towards this very ship as it lands in a field of green, lights gleaming as the engine touches down.

The dice beneath her palm clinking together snaps them back to reality. Ben lifts her hand enough to slide the gold dice into his palm. She watches as he turns them over, a complex web of emotions struck across his face that would take weeks to untangle. Another image, even more fleeting, a small, dark-haired child sitting on the floor of the Falcon, spinning the dice over and over again in his hands. The memory fades as quickly as it appeared.

“Was it worth it?” Rey asks quietly. _Killing your father. Killing Snoke. Everything._

Ben swallows, hand clenching with a nervous twitch. “Yes.”

Rey pries his hand open, tracing the edge of the dice where they lay on his palm. “Liar,” she says.

Ben wrenches his hand back. The dice fall to the floor with a clatter and by the time Rey lifts her head, Ben has disappeared.

\--

She dreams of him that night. 

Lying on a hilltop, staring out at a world green and lush and warm. A teenager with black hair who never smiles, separate from his peers. 

She wakes to the sound of someone breathing and slowly opens her eyes. Ben’s lying in a bed across the room, hiding beneath the covers up to his chin, so close and yet so far away.

Ben doesn’t blink, eyes flickering over her face. It should be unnerving, having someone look past her eyes, right down to her soul. Instead, every bit of tension leaks out of her body and into the mattress below.

Cocooned by the silent dark, Rey finds her courage. “I want to understand,” she says. “Why you turned away from the light. Tell me.”

“I thought you knew everything you needed to know,” Ben mutters, less the Supreme Leader than a petulant child. 

“That was before you tried to destroy what was left of the Resistance.” _Including your mother._

Ben’s jaw clenches as his teeth grind together. He doesn’t say anything else. Rey sighs, rolling onto her back and staring at the ceiling. She expects the connection to cut out; it doesn’t.

She doesn’t know how long they lie there in silence - minutes, hours, maybe even days. Time passes strangely in the limbic space of the Force.

“My parents brought me to Luke when I was six,” Ben says, and Rey turns onto her side. “My father wanted to raise me himself, but -- my mother insisted I learn to control my powers. To become a Jedi.” He drags a hand through his hair, resting his palm at the back of his neck and revealing a bare shoulder. “They didn’t raise me - not really.”

“But Luke did.”

“No,” Ben snaps, voice like a whip crack as he twists his head to the side, meeting her gaze once more. “Luke trained me in the ways of the Force. He was never an uncle to me, not in any way that mattered. He was my teacher. Nothing more.”

Rey’s heart pounds behind her ribcage. “They loved you,” she murmurs; feels Leia’s love for her son, shining like a beacon, consuming the emotions battering her on all sides from everyone else on the base. “They still do.”

“And what would you know of it? You don’t even remember your parents. They cast you aside like you were nothing.”

The words sting as much as they did when he uttered them in the throne room.

Rey doesn’t remember anything from when she was young. Like she woke up one day on Jakku, a semi-formed human child, thrown into what might as well amount to slavery by the people who were supposed to love her most.

She and Ben are more alike than they’re different, after all; two souls alone in the universe, abandoned by the people sworn to love and protect them above all else.

“You’re right," she says finally. "That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand.”

Ben’s breath catches in his chest, eyes watery and wide. Her eyes blur with tears that she refuses to let fall. 

“I don’t want us to be enemies,” she whispers, clenching her hand into a fist so she doesn’t reach across the divide. She thinks about the war ending. What it would be like to have him here, with the Resistance. With his mother. In Rey’s arms.

His breath stutters, and he shakes his head as if the simple act of moving will shake the images loose. “This war isn’t going to end just because you wish it would.”

He sounds like Luke. He flinches like he hears the thought. Memories flash through her mind of a frightened boy standing beside his father, begging for help, for release, raw as a gaping wound; the same boy lying in bed as his Master stands above him, filling the tiny room with a fury of green light.

“Ben--” Rey says. She reaches out. Ben slips through her fingers as he fades from her grasp.

\--

The Force allows them a minor reprieve, and the connection between them lies quiet. Rey’s brain, however, runs a thousand miles an hour. She throws herself into helping the Resistance, working herself to exhaustion. Desperate to see Ben’s face again.

She sleeps, haunted by her own memories: twelve-years-old, alone in the hollow wreck of a TIE fighter, begging silently for someone to find her and take her away, so she isn’t so alone.

The images bleed into the bond: the blue of her mother’s eyes, the blonde hair, pale skin, and heart-shaped face; her father, dark hair and dark eyes, money placed in olive-skinned hands, the same hands that raised a bottle of drink to his lips every night.

The same hands who shoved Rey into the desert sands, gripped her mother’s arm, and dragged her onto a ship that sped off into the distant skies, heedless of their daughter’s screams. 

Rey wakes up crying, Ben’s arms cradling her to his bare chest.

“You’re okay,” he whispers, one hand dragging through her hair. “You’re okay.”

“I’m not,” she gasps when she finally catches her breath. She pulls back enough that she can see his face, so close, their noses touch. “Neither are you.”

Ben’s eyes follow the length of her face, eyes, nose, cheeks. Lips. Her mouth parts.

He cradles her face and kisses her, eyes squeezed shut as his mouth presses desperately against hers. She grabs his hair with one hand, the other holding tight to his shoulder, hard enough that her nails leave indents in his skin.

She kisses the corner of his mouth, the curve of his jaw, tasting the salt of his tears on her tongue. Ben drags their mouths together.

“You terrify me,” he says, words broken against her lips. “The things I would do for you--”

He nudges her head back, biting at her neck hard enough to bruise. Entire galaxies explode behind her eyes. He kisses her until she can’t breathe, filling her lungs with his scent, his mouth, the touch of his hands, nothing but _Ben, Ben, Ben._

He pulls away with a rough gasp, hands recoiling like he’d been burned. She reaches out, chest heaving, unable to draw enough oxygen into her lungs. 

Ben turns his head away, eyes clenched tightly shut. Her hand hovers in mid-air. 

The connection falls away, leaving her with an empty room, the stars outside the window, and the waves battering the cliffs in the distance. 

\--

She barely sees Ben for days after, bleeding into a week, then two. A connection, brief, while she’s eating dinner. A bright, crackling light flickering in the corner of her room. A flash of Ben’s face instead of her own reflection in a mirror. The images fade quickly, but his emotions don’t, guilt and a longing so deep, it drags the air from her lungs. 

Luke’s saber remains all but forgotten in the face of her own selfish heartache. She’s on the Falcon, holding one half in each hand, when the bond blows wide open. Ben’s standing in a dark room devoid of any windows, hands braced on the back of a chair at a long table. 

He’s wearing the mask again, the cracks where he welded the metal back together as red as his saber. Hiding him away. Keeping him in the dark.

The pieces of Luke’s saber grow heavy in her hands. “Ben,” she chokes out, but Ben turns his face away. He sits down at the table. 

She shuts her eyes. The Force howls with her grief.

When Rey opens her eyes, she’s alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Twitter: [@jacyevans_](https://twitter.com/jacyevans_)  
> Tumblr: [jacyevans](https://jacyevans.tumblr.com/)


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